Study Aims to Improve Diabetes Management in High-Risk Youth

Study Aims to Improve Diabetes Management in High-Risk Youth

A little motivation for parents could go a long way toward improving young diabetes patients' ability to manage their own care, a Wayne State University (WSU) researcher believes.

Deborah Ellis of WSU's School of Medicine, has received a grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases of the National Institutes of Health to develop and preliminarily validate a computer-delivered intervention to increase parental motivation to supervise and monitor diabetes management behaviour of young adolescents who are beginning to manage their diabetes care by themselves. A companion intervention to increase the youths' own motivation to improve their diabetes care also will be developed as part of the study.

The study, Ellis said, is designed to address poor diabetes-related health outcomes among a particularly high-risk group: urban, African American youth with diabetes. Those disparities can be caused by higher insulin resistance and a greater number of single-parent households among African Americans compared to other groups, she said. Content currently is being developed; actual testing of the intervention is scheduled to start in two to three months.

"Common sense might suggest that parents do need to oversee adolescents' diabetes management," Ellis said, "but there's been a consistent finding in the literature that such supervision doesn't necessarily happen. Research shows that parents tend to back off as their children enter adolescence and let them have more responsibility for care than they are ready to manage."

"We're trying to motivate parents to continue supervising and not simply rely on asking their child if diabetes care was done. The intervention will be delivered by computer, because if you're looking for something you can deliver widely, it's got to be brief and easily replicated, and if you're talking about medical care, it's got to take little time on the part of physicians and other health care providers, because they're very busy."